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COMMENTARY: GEORGE TEMPLETON
EvolutionaryJohn Dewey wrote, “Every thinker puts some portion ofan apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what willemerge in its place.” He felt that past doctrines always require somereconstruction because of cultural, technical, and political evolution. Forhim, the scientific method, and democracy in politics, education, andjournalism embodied a single ethical ultimate ideal for humanity.
Educationwas a balance between content knowledge and experiences that would help man tounderstand his relationship to facts and truths, thus acquiring the toolsneeded to become the informed citizenry that would drive social evolution.
Dewey’s views are an anathema to anti-evolutioncreationists who on a recent radio program demonized him as nothing short ofthe anti-Christ. There was no way that his attack on certainty could bedivorced from their emotional reality. It is as Georgia’s Republican representativePaul Broun, who sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology committee said: Evolution, embryology, and Big Bang cosmology are lies from the pit of hell.
The Genesis story about eating the forbidden fruit of thetree of knowledge suggests that people are innocent and virtuous when they areunsophisticated. Knowledge introduces temptations and opportunities that leadto sin. Ecclesiastes 1:18 says, “For in much wisdom is much grief and hethat increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
Is ignorance really strength?
Twilight ZoneMathematics is more than numbers. It is a language and arefinement of everyday thinking. It cannot prove every truth. Certainty issubordinate to truth. Uncertainty is not always a consequence of ignorance. It was Lord Kelvin who maintained that measurement and quantification were thefirst steps to understanding, but quantification does not capture reality asmuch as it creates it. Certainty seems to be an artifact of human psychologyinstead of an attribute of our world. Uncertainty is the friend of curiosityand discovery.
More than fifty years ago an aging mathematics professoremeritus explained to his beginning class that they could enter the twilightzone at any time. You didn’t need a doctorate. Wonder and mystery existedeverywhere if we would only open our eyes to see.
SimulationComputer games are evolutionary.
A student can write a computer subroutine about half an inchlong to quickly solve problems that would otherwise require years of scienceand classical math study. The method is listed below to show that it is simpleand obviously true.
1. Regeneration: Where you are at depends on where you havebeen.2. Continuity: What comes in must go out or it will pile up.3. Temporality: The fastest wins the race and comes first.4. Linearity: Make long journeys with a large number ofsmall steps, each resulting in miniscule changes.5. Evolution: Obey nature’s simple laws. They definethe rules but not the complex outcomes that evolve.
ScientificScience is not about making an informed decision based onevidence that fits in with your beliefs. Life is a dynamic pattern oforganization and patterns are what math is all about. Our lives are aboutbringing the world outside into harmony with our gut feel. Science is aboutchanging our gut feel to harmonize with the world outside.
Efforts to discredit Darwin’stheory fail to understand that evolution does not claim that life arises purelyby chance. Intelligence and creativity are built into the fabric of the cosmosand did not follow the creation of mankind. In nothing more than chance wefind structure. In contrast, our efforts to make life more predictable andexplainable lead us to see patterns where none exist. Uncertainty andambiguity are universal and imply a feared lack of control, but they are alsothe fuel of wonder, freedom, and creativity. We can’t avoiduncertainty. We must learn how to live with it.
ProbablyIvars Peterson’s book TheJungles of Randomness describes how we see a lack of intent inanything irregular and disordered, but patterns exist when we are not aware ofthem. When we see no clear relationship between cause and effect, we assumethat some element of randomness must be present. However, we must distinguishbetween a random process and the results of that process.
Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth century Social Darwinist,journalist, and banker, ignored the debauchery of gambling when he claimed“Life is a school of probability.” Risks versus rewards are therealities of investment. Uncertainty is the price of being alive.
We think of randomness as having no pattern, but that is nottrue. Pure chance can lead to highly ordered results, and a completelyspecified deterministic process can lead to unpredictability. When we haveonly results we cannot know their cause. A random coin can come up heads tentimes in a row even though that is unlikely.
Computer programs can createlists of random numbers that come from a completely determined program. Whatseems random can be intelligent design, and what seems to be the act of acreator can be pure chance subject to an unknown and unseen probabilitydistribution such as the bell curve that teachers grade by.
Statistical probability that uses sampling techniques, suchas in voter polls, has to provide the same results as common sense probability,the kind that comes from counting the number of ways an event can or fails tohappen, but it does so only when we roll the dice an infinite number of times. Infinity is important, and thought to be the realm of God, because onlyit guarantees the stable long-term behavior of nature’s laws. It wasGeorg Cantor, the developer of modern set theory, who proved that someinfinities are larger than others! His mathematical correspondence would laterbe used in proofs about the limits of human knowledge.
Data and Law There is a young child’s toy consisting of successivelysmaller concentric disks mounted on a rod so that a conical pyramid is formed. Hindus give us two more empty rods and a total of sixty-four discs. They explainthat the world will end when we finish transferring the disks to another needle,provided that we move only one disk at a time and we never allow a smaller diskbeneath a larger one. Examination quickly shows that each transfer requirestwice as many moves as the previous. If we try to describe the step by stepmovements we are met by increasing complexity and incomprehensible hugenumbers. Two to the sixty fourth power minus one moves are required. If wemade non-stop movements every second it would take fifty-eight thousand billionyears, more than ten thousand times the estimated age of the earth, toaccomplish the task.
A simple structure subject to a few rules can generate hugeamounts of confusing data. Data cannot be trusted apart from context. However, science is called upon to infer context given only data.
OmegaKurt Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem”showed that math could not prove all truths. Alan Turing’s computer “HaltingProblem” proved that certainty is not computable. They laid thefoundation for Gregory Chaitin’s extension of what computers can’tdo to what man can’t know.
Complexity, an argument for intelligent design, is difficultto quantify. If we can find the underlying laws, complexity goes away. Scientists use computer programs to draw a curve through the data points tryingto find a simplifying relationship. If this can be done, the data is notrandom and a computer can always find the original law, the conical pyramid andits rules. Math can always draw a complex curve that goes exactly through thedata points but if the explanation is as complex as the data there is nosimplification. Then the data is random by definition. Withoutsimplification, no theory explaining the data exists.
Gregory Chaitin generalized the Halting Problem to allpossible computer programs. He calculated a precisely defined but unknowable numbercalled “Omega”. In so doing, he proved that pure randomness is anintrinsic part of mathematics. No mathematics will ever be able to grasp ultimatereality.
ChaoticA butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing in March makes the August Atlantichurricane season completely different. Everything is complex, intimatelyconnected, surprising sensitive to, but ultimately independent of beginningconditions. Order, not chaos, is the foundation of everything.
The math of chaos begins with simple equations expressingunderlying laws, like those used by our student. As the simulation begins, itsbehavior is certain, but then accumulated tolerances drive it into wildlyunpredictable patterns. More information will not make the uncertainty disappear. It is not a matter of our inability to know the present in all its determiningdetails.
In nature, chaos is the rule. Order is the exception. Uncertainty,felt to be incompatible with the Almighty, evolves out of certainty even thoughthe emerging patterns express an extreme order, as in snowflakes, instead of anexpected random structure.
EntropyTime is a consequence of change giving birth to causality. Asthe arrow of time irreversibly moves from past to the future, organizationdecays into disorder and formlessness.
Entropy comes from the laws of thermal physics. It isdemonstrated by a drop of ink in a glass of water that diffuses and spreadsthroughout, and never reorganizes into the beginning droplet. The large numberof molecules in the glass causes a gradual spreading of the ink instead of theunseen erratic motion of individual particles. The certainty of entropy comesentirely from the fact that it deals with immense numbers. Although entropywins in the long run, structure arises at the expense of chaotic increaseelsewhere. Locally, the universe has a built-in tendency to order. However,order is subjective, not objective. It requires an observer.
DegenerationWe proudly think of evolution as ascendency instead ofadaptation. Man in the future will be a far more perfect creature. Could Goduse evolution as his method for creation?
Drummond, in his 1891 work, NaturalLaw in the Spiritual World, argued that deterioration is the law ofnature. He saw a cycle of youth, maturity, aging, and final decrepitude. Deathis nature’s natural state. A universal force leads us to incivility, imbecility,and madness. We are like the man who falls from a fifth floor balcony. Thesame force that caused him to fall the first foot will surely make him fall theremaining fifty feet.
Drummond may not have realized that nothing in Darwin’s theory isclearly directional describing an upward force toward improvement.
EvolutionOur mind and substance are different perspectives on a singleunified mysterious reality. William Byers’s book, The Blind Spot, explains it. We areunavoidably both participants and observers, both subjective and objective,unavoidably implicated in a river of continual evolving flow, changing thecourse of history while being part of it.
Knowledge does not come into being fully formed. Creativesolutions have always been step by step. Ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve. They don’t just proliferate and survive or die in disputation. Theychange qualities creating new paradigms.
Explanations take time andresources. They always reveal new questions requiring further explanation. Inthis respect, evolution is an emergent property, like Chaos, depending on manyfacts, math, and all the sciences. It is not constrained to biology, butrather can be recognized as the unifying foundation of life, thought,complexity, and ultimate reality.
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